California Tea Partiers Revved Up by Redistricting Reform

Few ordinary Californians have been more intensely interested in the state’s new Citizens Redistricting Commission than Berkeley-based Tea Party activist David Salaverry.

Back in March, he realized that the fledgling panel, with its 14 citizen members drawing political districts instead of politicians and its commitment to openness and transparency instead of behind-the-scenes deal-making, offered a golden opportunity for conservative Californians to influence the redistricting process at a time when their political clout was waning in other ways.

The cabinet-maker and building contractor sent email blasts to “patriot” groups around the Bay Area, encouraging them to attend meetings and to write and call the commissioners.

He ran small training sessions for local Tea Partiers explaining the redistricting process and outlining main talking points—especially the idea that the commission should be “colorblind” in drawing political maps.

Salaverry, dubbed the “redistricting Paul Revere,” by right-wing blogger Dell Hill, received an enthusiastic response and has helped Tea Partiers dominate public input at commission meetings far beyond the Bay Area. “It all happened very quickly,” Salaverry said by phone while waiting for his two-minute time slot to testify before the commissioners at a Culver City meeting last week.

Commission Is Overwhelmed

Indeed, the activists have been such an overwhelming presence that the commission recently moved to limit the number of hearings for the rest of the summer, one commissioner said.

Instead of continuing through July, the meetings will now end next Tuesday—to the dismay of civil rights advocates. “We have concerns that opportunities for input are going to be limited by not having additional hearings,” says Eugene Lee of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC).

Given their successes in the 2010 elections, it should come as no shock that Tea Party activists across the country have seized on the redistricting process—the redrawing of political districts for Congress, state legislature, and local office, using the latest census data—as a way to consolidate their political gains for the next 10 years.

What is proving more surprising (and to some, alarming) is how astutely Tea Partiers in California have taken advantage of redistricting reforms that were intended to make the process less partisan and—groups like Common Cause had hoped—fairer to long-disenfranchised minorities.

Yet the goal of many of these conservatives seems to be to block Democratic-leaning Latinos, in particular, from making electoral gains at the expense of the state’s declining white population. “It’s simplistic to say we are colorblind and that race should never be taken into account,” Lee says. “There is still racially polarized voting, and sometimes it’s necessary to consider race to make sure everyone has a voice.”

New Process Favors the Vocal

The California Citizens Redistricting Commission is the result of ballot measures approved by voters in 2008 and 2010. Supporters argued that the first step to fixing the state’s dysfunctional government was to take the power to draw political districts away from self-interested politicians and put it in the hands of ordinary citizens.

But many civil rights groups opposed the ballot measures, worrying that low-income communities of color—especially immigrants—wouldn’t participate in such an abstract, complicated, time-consuming process. Those fears are turning out to be well founded.

Some of the basic elements of the new redistricting process have proved helpful to well-organized and vocal groups on the right, civil rights activists say.

Even though California is a deep blue state, by law the commission must include the same number of Republicans and Democrats (five), as well as four minor-party members or Independents, who often lean Republican.

As redistricting amateurs, few of these commissioners know the ins and outs of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), which is supposed to protect the rights of minorities as political maps are drawn.

The commission’s openness and accessibility—it’s already held dozens of public meetings across the state and has several more planned through Tuesday, June 28—has also been a boon for activists trying to sway the commissioners about where boundaries should be drawn.

Civil rights groups have tried to get ethnic minorities to come to the meetings to advocate for their “communities of interest”— factors such as race and ethnicity, socio-economic status, public schools and parks, transportation, and local industries that bind people into communities that transcend neighborhood, city, and county boundaries. Keeping those “communities of interest” intact on political maps would give them a better chance of electing officials who are responsive to their concerns.

But Tea Party activists have turned out in far greater numbers. Indeed, the crowds have been so large—as many as 100 to 150 at some hearings—that commissioners have had to bring additional security and limit the number and length of testimonies.

The commission’s first proposed maps, released June 10, reflect many of the Tea Partiers’ demands, civil rights advocates complain. The first draft of the congressional map, for example, doesn’t include any new Latino majority districts, even though Latinos accounted for 90 percent of California’s population growth in the last decade, according to the 2010 Census.

“It is a worst-case scenario for the Latino community and would severely diminish political opportunities,” says Rosalind Gold, senior director of policy, research and advocacy at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund in Los Angeles.

Arguing That Race Shouldn’t Matter

One of the key Tea Party talking points is that race and ethnicity shouldn’t be taken into consideration at all by the commission when it comes to drawing political maps.

“A lot of conservatives feel we’ve made remarkable progress on race in America through the civil rights movement,” says Salaverry, whose father’s side is Latino. “It’s time to move on and become a post-racial society, but unfortunately because of the Voting Rights Act and well-funded ultra-left wing activist groups, we won’t.”

Similar complaints have been made by Tea Party groups at redistricting hearings in the South, Texas, and other states, says Anita Earls, executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a civil rights group based in Durham, N.C. “They are very strident,” she says. “They’ve been pretty strongly anti–Voting Rights Act.”

Along similar lines, Tea Partiers in California and elsewhere insist that map-drawers put a priority on keeping cities and counties intact instead of splitting them up to increase the number of districts where minorities are the majority.

Indeed, city boundaries have often been drawn specifically to limit the voting power of minorities, Earls notes, so keeping them intact can perpetuate racial injustice. Modesto’s boundaries, for example, “look like Swiss cheese, with almost all the areas that aren’t counted [being] Hispanic,” she says.

Comments

Well, the California Progressive Democrats have also been revved up about the redistricting! We are hoping to be able to gain the extra two CA State Senate seats that it will take to add some revenue through taxes to our ailing state economy. It is time to make the wealthiest Californians and the Corporations pay their fair share of taxes! We also need oil extraction fees for oil companies that are taking our oil for free! AND, we need Single Payer Health Care for every Californian! Those are the things that will end our budget crisis in California. GO PROGRESSIVES!!! The Tea Party needs learn from them how to deal with the economy. Green jobs are the future of California.

Wellness

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Environmentalism

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